Everyone Hates Cyclists (Except When They Don't)
The complex relationship Italians (and others) have with cycling, blending the charm of the race tradition with the tensions it creates.
The roads through Valdengo wind toward the sanctuary of Oropa like ribbons thrown carelessly across the Piedmont hills. Last Sunday, they belonged entirely to the cyclists—or more precisely, to the grand theater of Italian professional cycling, as the first edition of the TROFEO TESSILE e MODA VALDENGO – OROPA carved its way through these ancient textile valleys.
By mid-morning, the procession had already begun. First came the motorcycle outriders, their engines growling importantly. Then the police, lights flashing their blue authority across shuttered shops and closed intersections.
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The lead group appeared next—a tight knot of lycra and carbon fiber, flanked by escort motorcycles leaning into curves with practiced grace. Behind them, the peloton: that mesmerizing, undulating mass of color and motion that is professional cycling’s signature spectacle.
Finally, trailing like the tail of a comet, came the stragglers, the hopefuls, the “participants” whose race is less about winning than simply finishing, followed by support vehicles, ambulances, and more police.
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For perhaps ninety minutes, nothing else moved. Traffic lights blinked uselessly at empty intersections. Cars idled in side streets. Shopkeepers stood in doorways, arms crossed, checking their watches.
This is the paradox of cycling in Italy: a nation that simultaneously reveres and resents the bicycle.
The reverence runs deep, carved into the national consciousness since 1909 when the first Giro d’Italia transformed mountain passes into cathedrals and cyclists into saints. Coppi and Bartali weren’t just athletes—they were living allegories, their rivalry a proxy for Italy’s postwar identity crisis. Every spring, millions still gather around televisions to watch modern gladiators suffer through Alpine stages, their pain somehow ennobling, their determination somehow Italian.
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Local races like the Valdengo-Oropa trophy connect small communities to this grand tradition. They transform Sunday mornings into festivals, drawing families to roadside picnics, volunteers to water stations, and local sponsors eager to attach their names to something wholesome and historic. For a few hours, these valleys remember what they were: centers of textile manufacturing now mostly memory, their identity borrowed from the bodies pedaling past.
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But then Monday arrives.
And with it, the weekend warriors—packs of middle-aged men in team jerseys that cost more than their first cars, claiming the center of narrow roads, oblivious or indifferent to the line of cars accumulating behind them. The arrogance is particular and infuriating: a refusal to ride single file on blind curves, an entitlement to space that drivers, by law and custom, must respect but rarely want to give.
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The complaints are predictable because they’re true. Cyclists run red lights with impunity. They block traffic on routes designed centuries before anyone imagined vehicles moving faster than horses. They wave dismissively at honking horns, secure in their moral superiority—after all, they’re not polluting, not consuming, not destroying the planet with their Sunday hobby.
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The truth, like most truths in Italy, lives somewhere in the complicated middle. Cycling is both a magnificent tradition and a minor tyranny, both a cultural patrimony and a traffic nuisance. It’s the Giro d’Italia, and it’s also the guy in Rapha gear who just cut through the piazza against the light.
Everyone hates cyclists. Except, of course, when they remember why they love them.
In The Slow Life Library, you will find
The Secret Language of Italian Cycling
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